The Duke of Westminster, Hugh Grosvenor, was famously described by his father as being “born with the longest silver spoon anyone can have”.
Grosvenor, 32, owns more than 300 acres of some of London’s fanciest properties in Mayfair and Belgravia as part of a global, family-owned property empire valued at £9.5bn, making him the third richest person in the UK and, according to Tatler – until this weekend – the country’s “most eligible bachelor”.
Grosvenor, who is close friends with Prince William and godfather to Prince George, is officially off the market after announcing his engagement to his girlfriend, Olivia Henson, who works for the London-based ethical food company Belazu.
The silver spoon really is long. The family fortune dates back to Norman times, when the king’s head huntsman or “gros veneur” Hugh Lupus was granted huge swathes of land in Cheshire. It led Hugh Grosvenor’s father, Gerald, the sixth Duke of Westminster who died in 2016, to joke that his top piece of advice to budding entrepreneurs was “to have an ancestor who was good friends with William the Conqueror”.
However, the bulk of the fortune is actually the result of an exceedingly fortuitous marriage in 1677 when Sir Thomas Grosvenor wed 12-year-old Mary Davies, the heiress of a City of London scrivener. Her dowry included 500 acres of boggy swampland and meadows to the west of what was then the boundary of London.
As the city expanded that land became hugely valuable and the Grosvenor family developed it into what are now some of the most exclusive neighbourhoods including Mayfair, Pimlico and Belgravia.
“In the process of time Mary Davies’s inheritance was developed for building, and the Grosvenors became the richest urban landlords in the country, the lustre of their name – for long synonymous with wealth and fashion – being gilded by successive advancements in the peerage, culminating in the dukedom of Westminster in 1874,” according to researchers at the Survey of London, a hugely ambitious academic endeavour to chart the history of every street in the capital.
“With only minor exceptions this part of Mary Davies’s heritage has remained virtually intact to the present day and forms the Grosvenor estate in Mayfair.”
Successive generations have been able to keep the estate – and fortune – together by avoiding potential ruinous inheritance tax bills by using a loophole that places the vast bulk of the assets in trusts.
The law states that most families should pay 40% tax on assets above £325,000 – or above £450,000 if the family home is given to children or grandchildren. If it had been applied to the late duke’s entire wealth, the liability would have been about £3.4bn.
Probate records show that Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor, who died aged 64 in August 2016, left a personal estate of £616,418,184 after payment of debts and liabilities. The rest of his wealth had already been transferred to an estate trust which largely passed to Hugh without incurring inheritance tax.
Instead of paying 40% inheritance tax, the Grosvenor trust structure allows the family to pay a recurring 6% payment on the value of its assets every 10 years, and there are inheritance tax reliefs of up to 100% on agricultural land and buildings.
Mark Preston, executive trustee and chief executive of Grosvenor Group, said: “I feel very strongly about the moral duty of all individuals and businesses to pay their fair share of tax and abide by the rule of law that determines it. So does the Duke of Westminster and the Grosvenor family. Our approach to tax is governed by a tax policy which can be read here.”
Although Hugh Grosvenor has two older sisters: Lady Tamara van Cutsem and Lady Edwina Grosvenor, he inherited the title and bulk of the fortune through the rule of primogeniture, which puts male children ahead of female siblings irrespective of age. The primogeniture law for the British monarchy was abolished in 2013 before the birth of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s first child, Prince George.
As well as Grosvenor Group, he also controls the family investment office, which employs more than 450 people and manages rural estates in Lancashire, Sutherland, southern Spain, and the family seat at Eaton Hall near Chester. It also takes care of the family’s art collection which includes works by Velásquez, Rembrandt and Freud.
